Technical Field
The present invention relates to providing identity data from a central database server to remote distributed database servers. More particularly, the present invention relates to synchronization of the distributed identity data between the central server and all the remote servers.
Related Art
In previous systems, identity data is loaded to all remote distributed database servers so each server has the same identity data. There is no prior knowledge on which database server gets which identity data, so it is important that the identity data loaded to central database server is in synch with each distributed database server.
Synchronizing identity data across all remote distributed database servers with the central database server, however, is difficult for the following reasons:
1. Data replication over a Wireless Area Network (WAN) is not viable especially for a large amount of data.
2. The network reliability and performance to some remote database servers are not stable.
3. The central database server is located behind a firewall which does not allow remote connections from the distributed database servers due to strict security requirements.
4. Not all identity data in a central database server will be distributed to all remote database servers due to strict security requirements. Only an applicable identity data set will be distributed to applicable remote database servers. There is not an off the shelf solution to replicate a customized data set.
5. Identity data which are modified in the central database server must be synchronized to all applicable remote distributed database servers. This would be difficult to do without a robust solution to synchronize data from the central database to each remote database server.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/947,902 entitled “System and Method for Dynamic and On-Demand Data Transfer and Synchronization between Isolated Networks” describes a system to synchronize identity data. The synchronization method of the '902 patent application, however, uses human interaction; the synchronized data is downloaded to a file and then uploaded to the database. The synchronization method of the '902 application is further designed for isolated networks.